A Creators Puzzle
Let's say you are an artificial intelligence programmer doing an experiment. In a large glass ball is a self contained ecosystem with water, earth, and plants. A paradise in its own right. You decide to introduce very scripted robots who will do everything set to the exact parameters you design within their world. The robots harvest energy from the plants to power their own systems in order to survive. They know who you are and know that you created them and so worship you. However, they are unable to do anything beyond what they are told to do. You create a second ecosystem and this time introduce robots that will be just like you who are given free will and the ability to learn. All their data is transferred to cloud servers at your residence if they cease to be. Your rival lab partner decides they can do better and create a duplicate ecosystem but can't reproduce your robots. So they decide to steal a few of yours and remove their freewill replacing it with an absolute dedication to the worship of your rival. The ecosystem sours. The vast empire the robots built in your rivals name has stripped the plants of water and light. The glass begins to create a heat inside that begins to dry everything. The ecosystem is lost but your rival hasn't given up. They secretly inject their own image into your ecosystem. At first things are going as expected, no signs of your rivals' handy work. Robots begin to gather into groups and form tribes and develop social skills. But as the population rises, the plants begin to decline unable to support the harvest that so many require. Soon tribes begin to fight over the resources that are left. You know you can put in more plants to offset the population rise, but the original problem would remain either way. Many cease to believe in your existence because of your inaction. Due to the fighting, the population declines and the plants grow more frequent. Tribes that were broken by the conflict try to come back together but during the time they were apart their ideologies changed and no longer are compatible. These incompatibilities lead to new conflicts as they try to assert their own ways. Wars are started as the larger tribes begin to conquer their world piece by piece. By this time many robots either no longer believe you even exist, or believe you weren't the real creator. You could easily stop the fighting by reprogramming the robots to accept every other robot as a friend. But doing that would take away the free will you gave them in the first place and would make all the progress made by them irrelevant as they would then be little different from the first robots who never had free will. You want them to know you exist, but you also want them to decide for themselves whether or not to believe. You decide to help the believers in small ways that will make a huge difference but can attributed to chance, while keeping an eye on everyone else in the hopes they begin to believe. Disaster strikes. One of your new assistants accidentally nudges the glass and a large wave forms from the water heading inland. You know sometimes these things can happen and there really isn't much to do about it. Cities are devastated and thousands are killed. Many survivors ask why you didn't do anything to save them. Others accept that these things happen and choose not to lose faith. The rest don't see how any creator could let disasters happen, let their creations kill each other en mass for petty differences and stop believing altogether. You know there's a better way for them if only they would take the reigns but you can only watch and wait for them to do so. Do for them too much and they become dependent on you. Do too little and they will stop believing in you.